Despite the large number of wives, he carefully obeyed the Muslim commandments on polygamy, for he is said never to have had more than two wives at once, and towards the end of his life he had only one wife. During this time he also wrote prolifically both in Arabic and Oromo. He is believed to have invented his writing system for Oromo in 1956 at the village of Hagi Qome. Neither Hayward nor Hassan offer a reason why Sheikh Bakri returned to his home area to work on his system, "unless it was for the purpose of keeping the thing secret, for the authorities would certainly have been adamantly opposed to the idea of Oromo being written in any form, let alone in a script other than Ethiopic." Although it was initially met with great enthusiasm and found a number of users in his province of Hararghe, the Ethiopian authorities predictably reacted with fear that he was "inciting the Oromo to too great an ethnic consciousness and thus endangering the national unity." Local officials moved quickly to suppress its use, and in 1965 Sheikh Bakri was placed under house arrest in Dire Dawa but allowed to continue his teaching. In 1968, he was given permission to visit Addelle two or three times a week. It was during these years that he wrote Shalda, a twenty-page pamphlet which purported to be a work of religious instruction, but was actually from beginning to end a caustically worded indictment of Amhara colonial oppression and an account of the suffering of the Oromo under the rule of Emperor Haile Selassie. Hayward and Hassan further note that "Shalda is of interest in that it is really both the first and the last major writing in Shaykh Bakri Sapalo's alphabet." In 1978, after Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed and the Derg gained power, Sheikh Bakri and his wife fled the Red Terror and fled to Somalia where they were admitted to a refugee camp in Hiraan. Sheikh Bakri had hoped he would be allowed to proceed further to Mogadishu where he could work and have his writings published, but he never received permission to leave the camp. Conditions there proved too much for a man in his eighties, and he died in the camp after a prolonged illness. Works Although Sheikh Bakri wrote many works both on religious and secular topics, except for a few